User communication

Principles

When possible, we like to have issues made openly (so that anyone at Aalto can see), so that users are more capable of supporting themselves by searching for past things, and in general not losing old information. Likewise, our answers are by-default public, too.

There should be particular care that users feel good when contacting us - being helpful and having a low barrier to being contacted is part of our brand and what makes us successful. You can read more about this at Garage support and How to actually respond to user support requests?.

It is important that we answer all user communication in a timely manner. It’s also important that short-term things don’t end up taking up all of our time. As of 2026, we are still thinking of how to handle this, but it’s important to keep in mind and if something is assigned to you, don’t forget it. If you see things that have been forgotten, bring them up.

Supporting users can be both very rewarding and frustrating at times. It’s also one of the things that can be hardest to learn and take a great emotional toll when it goes wrong. Realize it will take time and conscious effort to get good at this, and carefully observe, learn from, and give feedback to others.

Chat

Our internal chat system is also available to users, and there are many public channels that can be used to get questions from and talk to users.

Users often as questions on channels such as #triton and #general. We try to answer them when we can, but there is no guaranteed service level here. It can be helpful to watch, but you don’t need to let it interrupt your other work.

Triton issue tracker

The Triton issue tracker is the main way we like to get issues about Triton. This is like a classic request - response -close issue tracker, but as part of Gitlab issues so that all users can browse the back catalog and refer from it. Anything seen in chat which can’t be answered quickly can be directed here.

Esupport

This is the traditional email issue tracking system: mails go in, we can mail customers, make comments, and eventually make it as resolved. It’s the Aalto system based on some proprietary software and let’s just say the user interface can be difficult - but it works once you get used to it. I recommend that you don’t try to dive in alone but screenshare with someone and see how it works. Even replying to someone or closing an issue is an involved task that isn’t worth writing down (compared to seeing it live).

Personal email

Sometimes, users send us general issues to personal email. Most of us will try to direct this issue trackers.

If you are working on a project or have a long-term relationship to a group, it would make sense to mainly communicate directly with those people, not through the issue trackers. The risks are that, if you need to hand off to someone else, it will be hard to bring others up to speed.

In the end, you should just be aware of the matter and make the right choices for your projects: short, use trackers. Long, personal contact. Where the dividing line is depends on many different things.